Weatherlawyer wrote:

On Dec 14, 9:04 pm, Harold Brooks wrote:
In article 985f87a5-d49f-4dae-929f-
,
says...

On Dec 14, 6:23 pm, "Will Hand" wrote:

I'm not disputing the Arctic has warmed a lot either

I am.

Don't you mean it's got hotter?

The thermo-haline physics of the place will ensure a pretty constant
temperature average until almost all of the ice has gone.

If it doesn't, there is something wrong with the data presented.

Or there's something wrong with your understanding of the problem. It's
not a discussion of the ocean temperature, it's the air temperature.
You might be able to make an argument that there's an upper limit on the
average air temperature over the sea ice when ice is present, but the
temperature could be much colder than freezing and could have increased
dramatically without even reaching 0 C.

Quite right.

How was I to understand the reading of air temperatures over the
Arctic?

At what height would the Stephenson screens be set on the drifting
floes and how would you account for data affected by tidal
fluctuations raising and lowering said meteorological stations?

OK. I accept it was all done by Russian and USAn submarines and the
data adjusted to the best of their ability. And carefully collated
over the period of the cold war and then released a few years back and
has, since about 2005-2006, been released to the general public.

I really should have got around to reading it.

Or not, as the case may be.

Stephenson screens - or their equivalent - were erected on drifting floes or
ice islands (tabular bergs) and would have been placed at the standard
height above the ice surface. During the fifties and sixties there were
usually about four scientific bases in operation in the Arctic. The USA ran
two ice islands, Arliss II and T3, which continued circulating in the
Beaufort Gyre for around twenty years.

The USSR bases were usually on large floes rather than ice islands and were
relatively short-lived (two or three years) as they drifted across the
Arctic and were abandoned before they entered the Greenland Sea through the
Fram Strait. As one base was due to be abandoned another was being set up
so that they could keep a couple of stations operating. The Soviet bases
were named SP-nn (SP: Severnaya Poljus - North Pole), and I think had
reached about SP15 when I left the Met Office Ice Unit in 1973. By this
time, the USA ice islands had finally left the Beaufort Gyre and had been
abandoned as they went through the Fram Strait. The USA did not replace
these islands.

One problem with the USA bases is that they went through a period of a few
years when they couldn't make their mind up whether to report in Fahrenheit
or Celsius. Unfortunately, during most of the year, it was almost
impossible to figure out which was being used. This meant that the people
decoding the messages in our office could either have assumed F was C, or
assumed C was F and converted to C, etc.

I lost touch with what went on in the Arctic after '73 so don't know how
long the USSR bases lasted. I think that manned bases have now been
replaced with buoys dropped onto the surface.

--
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman, not newsboy.
"What use is happiness? It can't buy you money." [Chic Murray, 1919-85]